Secretary Of State For Scotland Research Articles

Scotland's Regional ambassadors? Assessing the Presence and influence of Scottish Elites in British Political Institutions

Are Scottish politicians regional ambassadors for Scotland in British institutions? This study explores the presence and influence of Scottish cabinet ministers and members of parliament (MPs) in British politics from 1945 to 2020. The paper shows that the traditional overrepresentation of Scots in Westminster ended in 2005. Scottish MPs have reached key positions in the House of Commons under Labour governments but disappeared almost completely from the front bench after 2010. Meanwhile, contributions by Scottish MPs have focussed heavily on issues that relate specifically to Scotland. Nevertheless, in the case of Whitehall, the article observes a limited presence and policy impact of Scottish ministers over the whole period, except under the Blair and Brown premierships. The only regular position reached by Scottish ministers has been that of Secretary of State for Scotland. However, the de-activation of the Scotland Office after devolution and the lack of Scottish Conservative ministers have limited the voice of Scotland in the executive. In summary, the British system of territorial recruitment ensures a minimum representation, but not necessarily an influence, of territorial minorities like the Scots.

Revamping doctoral training for a decarbonised future

Revamping doctoral training for a decarbonised future

Scotland’s formal landscapes surveyed on General Roy’s military map of Scotland

ABSTRACTMature designed landscapes planted c. 1700 are visible on General Roy’s Great Map of Scotland (1747 to 1755). The Scottish formal style, or Scottish Historical Landscape as it is known, was developed by the landscapists Sir William Bruce and Alexander Edward, and by the outstanding designer John Erskine, 6th Earl of Mar, Secretary of State for Scotland and later leader the Jacobite Rising of 1715. Essentially French in form but with avenues directed on natural and historical sites, the Scottish style achieved unique characteristics. The essay argues that recognition of the style, which is long overdue, will enable its evaluation as a Scottish national historical resource. The study contributes to current research on the impact of French designing beyond the European centres, and it will help disentangle the Scottish style’s characteristics from the dominant historiographies of the Picturesque.A selection of sites on Roy’s map were traced through nineteenth-century maps and compared with surviving contemporary mapping resources including aerial and satellite photographs. This enabled an evaluation Roy’s reliability for identifying these landscapes: instances of misplaced features and misaligned avenues were found. In addition, the digitisation of Roy for the National Library of Scotland’s website has distorted distances but the map’s geometry is generally sound.The study disclosed unknown designed features such as splayed or perspectival avenues. Dice-style or quincuncial planting, panorama terraces and roundels have been noticed by other researchers but the study reveals them to be far more numerous than presently thought. Finally, a new type of landscape adapted to mountainous sites is described.

Beneficial Interest and the Land Registration Act of 1979

The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2016 provides for the creation of a public register of controlling interests in the owners and tenants of land. The idea, it turns out, is not a new one. Forty years ago the UK Government came close to introducing a legislative provision which sought to achieve much the same ends. The existence of clause 4 of the Land Registration (Scotland) Bill of 1978 has hitherto been unknown. On the basis of a study of the relevant Government files, this paper considers why the clause was thought to be necessary and why it was discarded just before the Bill entered the public domain. Clause 4 was a response to a growing demand for information as to the ownership of land in Scotland. In a path-breaking book, Who Owns Scotland?, published in 1977, John McEwen attempted to list the owners of all estates of over 1,000 acres. On McEwen’s figures, around half of Scotland was owned by 546 individuals or companies. Far from satisfying public curiosity, McEwen’s book only served to increase it. As it happened, the then Labour Government was preparing a Bill for a new map-based system of land registration. The new register would show who owned the land. The purpose of clause 4 was to show who owned the owners of the land by requiring any company or trust seeking to register a title to disclose who held the ‘beneficial interest’ in the company or trust. Clause 4 was championed by the Ministers in the Scottish Office but resisted by civil servants. Having overcome that resistance, the Secretary of State for Scotland, Bruce Millan, was unexpectedly defeated by the refusal of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Elwyn Jones, to allow to be introduced for Scotland a provision which he considered unsuitable for England and Wales.

The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, Angus Graham and Gordon Childe (1935–46)

This paper explores the story of Scotland’s national survey body, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, between 1935 and 1946, with reference to Angus Graham, their Secretary, and Vere Gordon Childe, perhaps the best-known archaeologist of the 20th century. Much of the narrative describes the Commission’s survey of Orkney and Shetland, an eight year project which brought close contact with Childe, and special attention is given to debate over the Neolithic sites at Skara Brae and Rinyo. The outbreak of war in 1939 delayed their report for some seven years, but the government supported a major programme of rescue recording to mitigate damage caused by enemy bombing and the training of allied troops. In 1938 Childe was passed over for membership of the Commission, who felt that they had sufficient archaeological expertise. His extreme anger at this snub was to be reflected in a negative review of their forthcoming report, but was allayed by neat footwork on the part of the chairman. In 1942, when the Commissioners did indeed put Childe forward as a member it was the Secretary of State for Scotland that stood in their way. Dedicated efforts by the Commission finally persuaded him that Childe was not in fact a Communist threat, and he and Graham went on to record some 636 ancient monuments, while Graham alone took 2,200 images of historic buildings. The archive material (and Graham’s diaries in particular) shine a light on what was a pioneering project in testing times. The circumstances of the war, and the short duration of Childe’s membership, meant that his influence was in fact felt through fieldwork and not, as one may have expected, in the development of the Commission’s over-arching syntheses.

The ‘Modernisation’ of Scotland and its Impact on Glasgow, 1955–1979: ‘Unwanted Side Effects’ and Vulnerabilities

This article reports findings of research into the far-reaching plan to ‘modernise’ the Scottish economy, which emerged from the mid-late 1950s and was formally adopted by government in the early 1960s. It shows the growing awareness amongst policy-makers from the mid-1960s as to the profoundly deleterious effects the implementation of the plan was having on Glasgow. By 1971 these effects were understood to be substantial with likely severe consequences for the future. Nonetheless, there was no proportionate adjustment to the regional policy which was creating these understood ‘unwanted’ outcomes, even when such was proposed by the Secretary of State for Scotland. After presenting these findings, the paper offers some consideration as to their relevance to the task of accounting for Glasgow's ‘excess mortality’. It is suggested that regional policy can be seen to have contributed to the accumulation of ‘vulnerabilities’, particularly in Glasgow but also more widely in Scotland, during the 1960s and 1970s, and that the impact of the post-1979 UK government policy agenda on these vulnerabilities is likely to have been salient in the increase in ‘excess mortality’ evident in subsequent years.

Parliamentary Report

In October 2015 the Secretary of State for Scotland announced that the Government would bring forward an amendment to the Scotland Bill at consideration stage in the Commons to devolve responsibility for abortion law to the Scottish Parliament. It duly did so: see clause 50 of the Lords Bill as brought from the Commons. At the time of writing the Bill was being considered in the Lords.

Cosmo Innes and the Defence of the Scotland’s Past, c. 1825–1875 by Richard A. Marsden (review)

Reviewed by: Cosmo Innes and the Defence of the Scotland’s Past, c. 1825–1875 by Richard A. Marsden Peter C. Grosvenor (bio) Richard A. Marsden, Cosmo Innes and the Defence of the Scotland’s Past, c. 1825–1875 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. xi + 365. $144.95/£80. Scotland commanded the world’s attention during the country’s independence referendum in September 2014. Despite the 55 percent to 45 percent rejection of independence, it has retained that attention with the Scottish National Party’s sweep of 56 out of 59 Westminster parliamentary seats in the May 2015 UK general election. [End Page 433] Yet political nationalism of the separatist variety is a recent phenomenon in Scottish history, with no concerted and sustained challenge to the Anglocentric Union until the 1930s and no significant political breakthrough until the late 1960s. There has been a major scholarly effort to explain the relative historical lateness of Scottish nationalism’s emergence. Much of that effort has been concentrated on the historiography of Scotland in the mid-nineteenth century, a time when political nationalisms were ascendant elsewhere in Europe, as manifested in the revolutions of 1848. The established view within this scholarship is that Scotland failed to continue Sir Walter Scott’s project of countering the anglicizing forces of the Enlightenment by asserting Scottish distinctiveness within the context of the Union. This is held to be particularly evident in absence of a robust and distinctively Scottish national history, as is argued in Marinell Ash’s seminal text The Strange Death of Scottish History (1980). Dr. Richard A. Marsden, who teaches in the School of History, Archaeology, and Religion at Cardiff University, has entered this historiographical dispute with a meticulous study of Scottish antiquary Cosmo Innes (1798–1874). An advocate and judge by profession, Innes was a prolific editor of Scottish historical documents, with an emphasis on the medieval period, whose work earned considerable respect in both Scotland and England. Marsden’s study places Innes “at the forefront of a small group of antiquaries and historians who sought to make their fellow Scots more aware of and thus more appreciative of their own history” (297). The ideological framework provided by the Enlightenment produced a Scottish historical scholarship in which Scotland’s history was presented as a story of progress from the inferior and more primitive conditions of the past to the celebrated achievements of the present. The past, in other words, was something from which to escape. In particular, the pre-Reformation period was denigrated for a backwardness that was explained in terms of the constraints of Catholicism. Marsden demonstrates that Innes, whose political sympathies lay with the Whigs in politics, worked within this Enlightenment framework. At the same time, he was influenced by the early nineteenth-century resurgence of interest in Scottish distinctiveness and by a resistance to assimilation into English culture. By mid-century, these trends were manifesting themselves in the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights, which in turn prefigured the campaign for a Secretary of State for Scotland in the 1870s and, ultimately, the movement for Home Rule within the United Kingdom in the 1880s. While accepting the essential Englishness of the British Constitution, Innes set about establishing the Scots as something more than North Britons. His philosophy of history acknowledged historical specificity: the recognition that different peoples had different needs at different points in the past. Consequently, past institutions and practices were to be presented [End Page 434] not as historical blind alleys but as crucial and indispensible steps towards Scotland’s modernity. In this way, Innes attempted to reconcile progressivist and romanticist historical scholarship. This text is a valuable addition to the study of nineteenth-century Scottish historiography and adds to our understanding of the character of Scottish national awareness and political nationalism. Marsden supplies chapters which examine in detail Innes’s work on Acts of the Scottish Parliament, burgh sources, ecclesiastical cartularies, university records, family papers, manuscript facsimiles, illustrations, and photography. The appendix of “Innes’s Periodical Contributions” will be of particular interest to readers of VPR. Innes was a frequent contributor to periodicals during the 1850s and 1860s. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals attributes to...

The civil magistrate: the Scottish Office and the anti-Irish campaign, 1922–1929

The Church of Scotland's anti-Irish campaign in the 1920s was largely concentrated in persuading the Unionist government of the merits of legislation to restrict immigration from the Irish Free State. The accepted view has been that this campaign failed in its objectives due to overriding imperial concerns and the indifference, in some cases the hostility, of the Unionist party to the Church's case. This article seeks to re-examine the relationship between the Unionist party and the Church in the 1920s and to demonstrate how successful the Church actually was in persuading influential figures, notably Sir John Gilmour, secretary of state for Scotland and his deputy Major Walter Elliot, of the necessity to restrict immigration. It has also been the view that the Glasgow Herald, in a series of five articles in 1929, was pivotal in the public demolition of the Church's position. It will be shown here that there is evidence to suggest that these articles may have been inspired and possibly materially assisted by figures within the Scottish Office.

Ten‐minute chat

Kate Richards is the Principal Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Scotland and she leads the private office team supporting ministers in the UK Government. She graduated as a vet from Edinburgh in 1985 and worked as a farm animal practitioner and partner in Scotland before moving to the pharmaceutical industry. Three years later, she joined Defra as a veterinary adviser.

Scotland's Health, 1919–1948, and: The National Health Service in Scotland: Origins and Ideals, 1900–1950 (review)

Reviewed by: Scotland's Health, 1919-1948, and: The National Health Service in Scotland: Origins and Ideals, 1900-1950 Marguerite Dupree Jacqueline Jenkinson . Scotland's Health, 1919-1948. Studies in the History of Medicine, vol. 2. Oxford, U.K.: Peter Lang, 2002. 505 pp. Ill. $60.95 (paperbound, 0-8204-5622-5). Morrice McCrae . The National Health Service in Scotland: Origins and Ideals, 1900-1950. East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell Press, 2003. xvi + 288 pp. Ill. £25.00 (1-86232-216-3). Beginning in Britain on the Appointed Day, 5 July 1948, the National Health Service (NHS) was the result of separate legislation for England and Wales on the one hand, and for Scotland on the other. Charles Webster incorporates Scotland into his magisterial history of the NHS1 but suggests that the differences between Scotland and England and Wales were not significant; other commentators on the origins and early years of the NHS suggest that the differences were so great [End Page 474] that these authors limit their accounts to England and Wales. We are now fortunate to have two books that explore the distinctiveness of the patterns of disease and the nature of health care, health administration, and government policies toward health in Scotland during the years leading up to the establishment and implementation of the NHS. The books focus on the same period, from the end of the First World War until 1948, and not only do both authors argue that Scotland differed from England and Wales, but they are the first to elaborate the similarities and differences at length. At the same time, the books differ considerably from each other. Although there is some overlap, their emphases are distinct and, in the end, complementary. Jacqueline Jenkinson, author of Scottish Medical Societies and a coauthor of The Royal: The History of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, has written a highly structured and systematic book, concentrating on the personal health services, excluding mental health services and voluntary hospitals. In her introduction she establishes distinctive features of the Scottish population, economy, society, and morbidity and mortality patterns. Compared with England during the interwar years, Scotland displayed a unique combination of concentrated urbanization and heavy industry alongside remote regions of scattered population; deep-rooted poverty; severe housing problems; high levels of unemployment; and high morbidity and mortality rates (infant, maternal, and tuberculosis). Jenkinson then provides two chapters setting out the structure of health administration before and after 1929. In 1919, when the Ministry of Health was set up in England and Wales, a separate Board of Health was established for Scotland, composed not of civil servants but of "experts." In 1929 the secretary of state for Scotland became a cabinet office and the Board of Health became a department run by civil servants and was moved to Edinburgh. Jenkinson clearly describes the changes in administrative structure, and in the process she introduces Muriel Ritson, a pioneering woman health administrator, and shows that Ritson and other health administrators provided continuity through the administrative reorganizations. The next four chapters explore particular areas of health administration of major concern during the interwar period: infant and maternal welfare; the health of school-aged children and controversy over their nutrition; tuberculosis; and national health insurance. In the final chapter she resumes the chronological account, discussing the wartime health services and the creation of the National Health Service. Given the topical structure, there is inevitably repetition, but Jenkinson contributes useful tables setting out the wide variations in health patterns within Scotland. She also employs the Scottish experience to address controversies in the literature over the nature and extent of devolved authority, and over the process of policy formation, as well as historiographic controversies such as that between Charles Webster and Jay Winter over the health consequences of the First World War and economic depression in the interwar years, and Richard Titmus's view that warfare promoted welfare in the Second World War. W. Morrice McCrae's book is a revised version of his Ph.D. thesis, admirably undertaken in the Department of History at the University of Edinburgh after a successful career as a medical practitioner and administrator in the Scottish [End Page 475] Office. He effectively draws...

Employment Policies: A Lesson from America

The purpose of this article is to examine the controversy surrounding the means by which promises become binding in employment law. The dilemma is exposed in the decisions of the courts in Taylor v Secretary of State for Scotland. The industrial tribunal and the Employment Appeal Tribunal were prepared to accept that entitlements could be created unilaterally: “ the evidence was that…..changes and additions to prison officers’ contracts were notified by circulars …” In the House of Lords, adherence to the orthodox contractual model was so strong that their lordships felt that, in accepting the contractual status of the equal opportunities policy, they were obliged to invent a finding of fact that the notification was subsequent to a negotiated variation. The absence of evidence of this assumed prior negotiation leaves exposed the de facto acknowledgment of unilateral creation of contractual entitlements. Such a development poses questions about the jurisprudential nature of promises in employment law and the rationale for their enforcement.

Review: The State and the Nations

In mid-December 2000 both T h e Hera ld and T h e Sco t sman published prominently two separate reviews of this book by John Rcid, then Secretary of State for Scotland. He was pleased with it, as 'a balanced and intelligent overview of the devolutionary process'. This is an opinion with which I agree, but Reid then proceeded to give the impression that the book was an enthusiastic endorsement of Labour policies and practice. He quoted only one sentence: 'It is an extraordinary achievement to transform a highly centralised unitary state into a devolved and quasi-federal system of government in the space of only three years.' This sentence does occur, in Robert Hazell's Introduction on page 3; but the rest of the book is highly critical of Labour's performance on all levels. Perhaps Reid thought that he did not need to read beyond the Introduction because, as he said in one of the reviews, he is an insider who knows it all already. Alternatively, he was deliberately misrepresenting the general thrust of (he book.

Review: Scottish Parliament Books

On 6 May 1999, the people of Scotland went to the polls to elect their representatives to the new Scottish parliament set up under the Scotland Act 1998. In his foreword to A Guide to the Scottish Par l i ament , Donald Dcwar, the then Secretary of State for Scotland, describes the year of 1999 as an 'historic' and an 'exciting' one, adding that 'Scotland stands at the beginning of a new era, a new century and a new millennium' (p.7).

If you wanna be loved

If you wanna be loved

The Scottish Health Advisory Service visit

The Scottish Health Advisory Service (SHAS) was established in 1970 to provide information to the Secretary of State for Scotland and the Health Board on the management and running of hospitals for the elderly and for patients with mental illness and learning disability. The Health Advisory Service serves a similar purpose in England and Wales. The purpose of SHAS is to promote high standards of health care for these patients. The SHAS achieves this in different ways, but one of their main functions is to visit the hospitals regularly to assess the quality and effectiveness of the service.

The Barnett Formula and Public Spending in Scotland: Policy and Practice

For twenty years, Scotland has experienced distinctive arrangements for determining public expenditure under the control of the Secretary of State for Scotland. In recent years, the levels of public spending delivered by this system have been questioned by English MPs of both major parties, whether Conservatives disaffected by the 'dependency culture' which high public spending was deemed to promote, or Labour MPs envious of the Scottish totals and desirous of similar outcomes for their own areas.

The use of visitor understanding in skiing management and development decisions at the Cairngorm mountains, Scotland

The Cairngorm ski area is situated in the north-east area of Scotland in an area of outstanding natural beauty and ecological significance. Subsequently, development of the mountainside for skiing has been a contentious issue, particularly in the last two decades, as new development schemes have been proposed. Yet the skiing industry provides economic benefits, such as jobs and social stability, to the area. In 1992 a working party was established by the Secretary of State for Scotland with the purpose of developing a management scheme for the whole of the Cairngorm mountains. The draft plan was published in 1996, a part of which refers to the development of skiing at Cairngorm. A key aspect of future development at Cairngorm rests on a better understanding of skiers' needs and attitudes. This article is based upon interviews conducted with 490 skiers at Cairngorm during the winter of 1996/97, concerning both their expressed needs and environmental attitudes.

Executive Agencies within the Scotland Territorial Programme

This article supplements the cross‐sectional survey literature by focusing upon a subset of executive agencies which, though highly disparate on many dimensions, share the experience of being part of the command of the Secretary of State for Scotland. Agencies operating within the context of territorial management face markedly different operating environments. In particular, centralised financial control by the territorial department is an essential continuing feature of the public expenditure control system. The characteristics of those activities which have been agencified in Scotland are closely examined, followed by an evaluation of the implications for internal management, external accountability, the reform of the parliamentary system of Supply, and the extension of accruals accounting across central government.

Multicultural Education in Scotland: Ourselves and Others

This paper discusses the findings of the LACE report on comparable education expenditure in Scotland, England and Wales, which was commissioned by the Secretary of State for Scotland. This shows that Scottish expenditure was 23% higher than in England but that a large part of this excess arose from the higher incidence of local authority-educated children in Scotland. The article goes on to argue that the LACE report is better at accounting than analysis and that it excluded a number of important variables that can further explain the higher levels of expenditure in Scotland. The article concludes that variations can be further explained by consideration of differences in Government policy, such as provision of teachers in small rural schools and in deprived areas in Scotland.